Web development's lost decade

Amal sits down for a one-on-one with Alex Russell, Microsoft Partner on the Edge team, and former Web Standards Tech Lead for Chrome, whose recent post, The Market for Lemons, stirred up a BIG conversation in the web development community.

Have we really lost a decade in potential progress? What happened? Where do we go from here?

Discuss on Changelog News

Changelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Sentry – Session Replay! Rewind and replay every step of the user’s journey before and after they encountered an issue. Eliminate the guesswork and get to the root cause of an issue, faster. Use the code PARTYTIME and get the team plan free for three months.
• Lolo Code – If you’re familiar with building severless apps, think of Lolo Code as your backend with a visual editor that lets you think and build at the same time. All this without having to provision or manage servers. Use the visual editor to build your app, connect nodes, and add any npm libraries you need. You can even write your own integrations. This makes Lolo Code very Zapier-ish, but for devs. Try it free today with no credit card required at lolo.co/jsparty
• KBall Coaching – Free exploratory coaching sessions from JS Party co-host KBall! Click here to get started

Featuring:

• Alex Russell – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Amal Hussein – Twitter, GitHub

Show Notes:

• The Market for Lemons
• The case for frameworks - a rebuttal post by Laurie Voss
• A visual for session depth & frequency - a potential rubric for app architecture
• How Browsers Work
• Life of a Pixel
• WebPageTest
• The Mobile Performance Inequality Gap, 2021
• Alex’s Blog post on Performance Baseline’s
• Principal Agent Problem
• Alex’s talk on Progressive Enhancement @ Chrome Dev Summit
• React just released experimental support for web
• Chromium University
• Vincent Scheib - tweets lots of cool things
• Summertime Afternoon - a fun little WebGL app which sparks joy

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Opener
(00:27) - Sponsor: Sentry
(02:16) - It's party time, y'all
(03:12) - Welcoming Alex to the show
(04:55) - Getting to know Alex
(12:23) - The market for lemons
(32:20) - Sponsor: Lolo Code
(34:33) - The right architecture
(43:41) - Bridging all these gaps
(51:47) - Sponsor: KBall Coaching
(53:04) - Where to go from here
(1:00:19) - The goal is to help users
(1:08:52) - We all have skin in the game
(1:10:43) - Responding to criticsms
(1:13:28) - Learning resources aplenty
(1:16:32) - Wrapping up
(1:17:06) - Outro (Changelog++ Bonus!)

Episode source